Contemporary art trends and news from Asia and beyond

About Art Radar Asia

Art Radar Asia News conducts original research and scans global news sources to bring you selected topical stories about the taste-changing, news-making and the up and coming in Asian contemporary art.

Posts Tagged ‘Art networking sites’

What are Art Radar‘s most popular search terms? Japan tops other Asian countries with most-searched-for art, graffiti moves out from the underground and Chinese art and politics are brought once again to the fore.

Art Radar Asia has now published two lists of original data on our most searched contemporary Asian artists, one in December 2009 and the other in July 2010. With these lists, we attempted to offer some insight into which artists are currently enjoying popularity in the international and Asian art markets.

Chinese propaganda poster.

While doing this research we also noticed that a number of common search engine terms were leading people to our articles. Just as we did for our most searched artists, we have decided to publish a list of most searched terms used by readers, which could hint at current trends within the contemporary art community. This list covers searches undertaken between 30 June 2009 to 30 June 2010.

Art Radar Asia receives over 27,000 page views in a month. Our readers come to us from numerous places across the Internet: search engines like Google, social networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook, our weekly email newsletter and word of mouth. Our readers are art collectors, gallerists and dealers, art professionals, scholars and artists. For all these people, it is important to understand current trends in art, whether they are influenced by them or not.

We can’t claim that this list is a reliable proxy for the most-searched art terms on the Internet overall (take a look at our notes at the bottom of this article). However, we do think the list throws up some fascinating data. Below, we attempt to decipher some of the standout results from the tallies in this list.

Japanese art in top search spot

Takashi Murakami

Perhaps unsurprisingly, “Japanese art” sits in second place with an overall total of 1,680 searches. In both the December 2009 artist list and the June 2010 artist list, Japanese contemporary artist Takashi Murakami held the number one spot as most searched artist on Art Radar. The desire to know more about this artist could be one of the factors driving this search result.

Propaganda posters and Chinese propaganda

With the work of contemporary Chinese artists continuing to sell for high prices and the artists themselves continuing to make headlines – as artists in China work under strong censorship laws they often create reactionary works – contemporary Chinese art has remained popular for some time. In addition, the current political situation in China drives external interest in the history of the country, ensuring propaganda posters created decades ago remain both relevant to contemporary study and highly collectable.

In January this year, we published a two part series (Part I and Part II) explaining graffiti and street art. These articles have proven extremely popular, hinting at a desire to know more about this contradictory art form; it is one that is still often underground and sometimes even illegal (therefore inaccessible) and at the same time, with artists such as Banksy becoming known internationally, increasingly commercialised and collectible. We think this goes some way to explaining the 374 searches for “graffiti”.

Desire to connect to the international art community

We recorded 340 searches for “art networking sites”. Increasingly popular as a marketing and information tool, social networking sites tailored to art professionals can give members access to the knowledge of other art collectors and investors as well as the opportunity to view the work of artists from around the world. In March 2009, we linked to an excellent list of current social networking sites first published on Art Market Blog.

Notes

This list is not a reliable proxy for the most-searched art terms on the Internet overall. Here is why: If we have not written a story on or tagged this art term, the search engines will not bring us traffic for this search term and it won’t appear on our traffic analysis stats page. As we have only been up for just over two years it is quite possible that we have not yet covered some highly-searched art terms. And even if we have referenced an art term on our site and the art term is highly-searched, the searcher will not come to us unless we have a good page ranking for the story on the search engine. For example if the story is, say, after page 4 of the search engine results, the searcher probably won’t find our story and will not appear in our stats. Despite these limitations the data is likely to be a reliable indicator for certain trends. Finally even if we have a story and the story is well-ranked, it may be that other stories on the same page are more alluring than ours and readers do not find their way to us.